Creative Market just announced that all of their WordPress Themes are now 100% GPL, meaning to list in their marketplace and reach their users your theme must provide users with the same freedoms that WordPress itself does. They have some great themes already. This is fantastic news and I’m very proud of their team for taking this bold step, and as promised WordPress.org homepage promotion is forthcoming. I think we’ll see more of these down the line, especially as WordPress consumers start demanding 100% GPL from anything they buy.
Search Results for: GPL
Syn-thesis 3: Switchers
The biggest after-effect of the Thesis license violation episode seems to be raising people’s awareness of alternatives that are both fully GPL and have better functionally too. One theme that seems to be picking up a ton of new users is Genesis. We helped Laughing Squid and Paul Stamatiou make the switch, but Chris Brogan […]
Grand Unified Theory
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, […]
Themes are GPL, 2.0
Mark Jaquith wrote an excellent technical analysis of why WordPress themes inherit the GPL. This is why even if Thesis hadn’t copy and pasted large swathes of code from WordPress (and GPL plugins) its PHP would still need to be under the GPL. (Which apparently is Marxist. You learn something new everyday!)
Football to Themes
Drew Strojny tells his story of his journey from professional football player to small business owner to full-time WordPress theme developer, all in three years. (And GPL, natch.)
Web Services as Governments
Brad Burnham did a cool post on Web Services as Governments which I mostly agree with. In my talks I often refer to the GPL as software’s Bill of Rights. If you think of web services as governments, the need for a Bill of Rights fits right in.
After the Deadline now Open Source
After the Deadline, the intelligent spell- and grammar-checking service Automattic acquired a few months ago, is releasing its core technology under the GPL. There’s also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any textarea. Ostatic writes about it here.
Freedom in Action
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a story about someone republishing Mark Pilgrim’s book and selling it on Amazon. Not directly about the GPL, but the principles are the same.
Q&A: WordPress & GPL
In this one we cover the GPL and how it benefits WordPress, why WP is under the GPL, commercial themes, how the GPL fosters innovation, creates value, and affects themes and plugins.
GPL Win in France
Big Win for GNU GPL in France.
GPL FUD
GPL FUD round N+1.
Not Lonely at All
Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software wrote a blog post called Getting Pretty Lonely and and says, among other things, “Whenever I am reminded that WordPress is GPL, my passion for it takes a bit of a dive. I’m more comfortable with the true freedom of liberally-licensed products.” More importantly, he says that “GPL stifles […]
BuddyPress for the World
Happy to announce that BuddyPress is now available to the world. BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms WP into a social network complete with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and even activity streams. Of course it’s 100% GPL and Open Source. It’s built on top of MU (which can be tricky […]
Sun, Oracle, WordPress, and MySQL
It’s magically beautiful outside in San Francisco today, but instead everyone is talking about the $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. (More on Techmeme.) A number of people have contacted me with questions to the effect of “Oracle is evil, they now own MySQL, WordPress runs on MySQL, OMG! What’s next?” In addition […]
Magazine Theme
Check out “Magazeen”: Free Magazine-Look WordPress Theme. Even better: it’s GPL.
Theme Revolution
Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme, widely regarded as the most successful in the “premium” theme space, has seen the light and is going 100% Open Source under the GPL. Definitely a forward-thinking and strategic move. I think this may shake up the premium theme space.
WordPress is Open Source
Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead developer of […]
WP.com Marketplace Idea
At WordCamp Argentina yesterday I talked about an upcoming feature for WordPress.com, a theme marketplace, and while the feedback has been universally positive amoung everyone I talked to some folks who weren’t there and don’t speak Spanish seem to be criticizing third-hand, Google-translated information, which is a little sad to watch, so here’s some details. […]
Price of Freedom
I got asked an interesting question today: The only thing why (at least) I encode the footer is to prevent people from removing my designer link. I usually spend around 6 hours designing the graphics and coding the theme and some people simply take my link off and some of them even dare to write […]
MT OS
I am settled back from Greece and quite a bit happened while I was unplugged. I want to belatedly congratulate the Movable Type team for committing to GPL for MT4, and wish them best of luck in rebuilding their developer community. The news has been written about nearly everywhere, rightly so; Lisa has a blog […]